The Warsaw Uprising: 1 August - 2 October 1944 (Major Battles of World War Two)

by George Bruce

  For better or worse, the fortunes of the Polish underground were now permanently linked with General Sikorski’s Government-in-exile, whose varying fortunes depended upon its fluctuating relationships with Britain, the USA and Soviet Russia. But having subordinated Tokarzewski’s organization Sikorski decided that this General would best serve the underground elsewhere.

  He divided the entire underground into two regions, German-occupied and Soviet-occupied. Colonel Stefan Rowecki was given command of the German zone in Warsaw. Tokarzewski was ordered to proceed to the Russian zone, with headquarters in Lwow. The order caused anger among the politicians in Warsaw, because they had grown to like working with Tokarzewski; and since he had commanded the Lwow military district some years before, they believed he would quickly be recognized by the Communists, denounced to the Russians and seized.

  They persuaded him to postpone his departure while they argued with the Government in Paris by coded radio. But Sikorski decreed that underground work was equally dangerous in both zones and that Tokarzewski’s knowledge of the Lwow region would be useful. So towards the end of March 1940 he departed. A Russian patrol seized him while he was crossing the frontier between the two zones. He was thrown into prison.

  Responsibility for the Secret Army in the Russian zone fell on Colonel Rowecki’s shoulders in Warsaw. A coldly professional soldier and a veteran of the 1920 Polish-Russian War, Rowecki was guided in the initial organization of the Union for Armed Struggle by Sosnkowski’s Organizational Order Number 1 of 1940[13] which directed that the UFAS should be a small, élite group, foundation of a larger force that could be used to launch an uprising. Upon these principles Rowecki planned its organization.

  It was to be composed of provincial, regional, area, sector and outpost commands, with staffs, special diversionary-action platoons, and combat platoons situated in operational strongpoints. Outpost commanders could lead locally raised platoons. A platoon, about fifty men, was to be the basic organizational and tactical unit. The reserve included all undisbanded military organizations whose members comprehended military tactics and operational procedures. The UFAS was to draw upon this to replenish its ranks and would be used fully on the outbreak of a national insurrection. The mass of the community should be ready to take up arms in a general volunteer movement.

  Rowecki and his regional commanders began a campaign to unite all the many secret military groups in the country. Few of the smaller non-political ones resisted for long the pressure to merge with the UFAS. For military purposes officers and men were subordinated to the UFAS Command, but in their own separate units up to battalion strength, and with permission to keep their own social or professional traditions. They were free, so long as they were not hostile, to work on the underground political front for the kind of post-war Poland they visualized, and so long as this was non-communist.

  Three political parties held out against Rowecki’s efforts. First, the right-wing anti-communist, anti-Semitic National Armed Forces movement of the National Youth Organization. Fascist in outlook, its members even regarded the Union for Armed Struggle as procommunist. They were to develop a programme of military action against Soviet partisans and the Communists based on the belief that German defeat being certain, its occupation of Poland was temporary and that Russia was the worst danger.

  Second, the Communists, who although they had not re-formed the political party that Stalin destroyed in 1938, began to organize themselves in underground cells immediately after the defeat, Warsaw being their main centre. Communist groups included the Worker-Peasant Militant Organization, the Friends of the Soviet Union and the Liberation Struggle Union,[14] whose membership included metal workers, railway-men, tram drivers and public utility workers. It formed an underground military group under the command of Marian Spychalski. The Communist groups, in Warsaw and elsewhere in Poland, combined plans for liberation from the Nazis with plans for a Marxist social system brought about with the aid of the Red Army as it advanced against a defeated Germany. Thus, from the earliest days, the Communists were on a collision course with Sikorski’s UFAS; both hoped to seize power at the critical moment.

  The third party to hang fire were the National Democrats, a major party of property owners and some of the nobility, who were, as ever, at loggerheads with their traditional opponents, the Peasant Party and the Socialists. They declined to subordinate their expanding fighting force to Colonel Rowecki’s command because they might need it in defence of their interests were the Allies to defeat Germany, and peace come. Not until late 1942 did they bring over their force of seventy thousand underground soldiers to Rowecki’s command.

  To give more force to the call for unity and to strengthen the will to keep silent under Nazi torture, Sosnkowski devised with the help of a priest a solemn religious oath. Every member of the Union for Armed Struggle from Rowecki down to messenger girls and boys swore:

  Before God the Almighty, before the Virgin Mary, Queen of the Crown of Poland, I put my hand on this Holy Cross, the symbol of martyrdom and salvation, and I swear that I will defend the honour of Poland with all my might, that I will fight with arms in hand to liberate her from slavery, notwithstanding the sacrifice of my own life, that I will be absolutely obedient to my superiors, that I will keep the secret whatever the cost may be.

  The person swearing in the member responded sternly: ‘I receive you among the soldiers of freedom. Victory will be your reward. Death the punishment of treason.’

  Someone destined to play the most fateful part of all in the Warsaw Uprising now made contact with the UFAS. Colonel Komorowski, a cavalry officer who before the war had made a name for himself in the international show-jumping arena, lacked at this time either political or military ambitions. As one of the Polish minor nobility he was content in peacetime to farm his estate, ride his horses and take part occasionally in cavalry exercises with the Army. Thin, balding, pensive-looking, with a melancholy expression and a small clipped moustache, he was a strong upholder of the ‘two enemies’ doctrine and right-wing in politics; while not a leader of Rowecki’s calibre, he was at the same time respected, likeable, fair and determined.

  After the September defeat Komorowski began to make his way secretly to join thousands of others who were flocking to the banner Sikorski had raised in France, but friends in Cracow persuaded him otherwise. ‘We must fight in this country as well,’ they insisted. Komorowski agreed to stay and assume leadership of a military group which was planning to sabotage the Germans in south-west Poland.

  Chapter Three: Plans for an Armed Rising

  An envoy of General Sikorski entered Poland secretly from Hungary in March 1940, with instructions to Komorowski in Cracow to place himself under the command of the Warsaw GHQ of the Union for Armed Struggle. Komorowski decided to visit Warsaw and meet there the man in command. He and an aide travelled with carefully forged identity papers in a railway compartment reserved for Nazi businessmen. They posed as timber merchants from Germany buying wood for coffins.

  In Warsaw a liaison girl — a young housewife — escorted Komorowski to a private flat. He waited alone in a comfortable sitting-room, wondering who the UFAS commander might be, for as yet he knew him only by his alias, which was Grot. He heard a German patrol march by outside. The Nazi genocide policy had started, and Himmler had visited the capital at the end of March. Ludwig Fischer, Governor of the Warsaw District, reported afterwards to Hans Frank, Governor-General of Poland: ‘The Reichsführer-SS has ordered 20,000 Poles to be committed to concentration camps.’[15]

  The manhunt for people of influence had been speeded up. Those seized, Komorowski knew, were either transported to the camps, whose commandants Himmler had[16] reminded on 15 March 1940 that their chief duty was to liquidate all Polish leaders; or were shot in Parliament Gardens near the Vistula river by the 301 Battalion Security Police.[17]

  Hearing the harsh commands and the steady tramp of Wehrmacht units outside, Komorowski thought of the herculean task — the for
mation of a secret army to fight the Nazis — he and others had taken on. No chain is stronger than its weakest link. They all of them depended upon each other’s strength to stay silent under torture. In coming here he had put his life into the hands of someone about whom at the moment he knew nothing.

  He sat waiting. Then the door opened and closed quickly and he found himself walking forward to greet the burly smiling figure with its shock of cropped dark hair of the man to whom he would then have turned with most trust. His old friend Colonel Stefan Rowecki had commanded Poland’s only motorized brigade in the September campaign. Komorowski assured him of his confidence and that he would willingly serve under him. There and then they planned the dangerous problem of liaison between Warsaw and Cracow, agreed on methods of sabotage, training and uniting the many secret military groups under one command.

  It was an important meeting in the life of the Secret Army, for these two men were to be its chief architects.

  Like many Poles, Komorowski had a passion for ‘good conspiratorial practice’ — false identity documents, disguise, daily changes of rendezvous in homes of sympathizers to whom they were complete strangers; a new password every day, a different sleeping-place every night, and a tiny phial of cyanide for staff members who knew the movement’s secrets to swallow when all seemed lost.

  The Gestapo were constantly active. Everyone feared finding his name in black print in their lists of wanted men. In streets, cafés, shops, all Poles, even adolescents, had to keep alert and watch what went on, for at any moment they could be seized in a street-raid, flung into a lorry and never be seen again.

  The Secret Army moved quickly to active operations under the leadership of Rowecki and Komorowski. By early 1940 it had launched sabotage of railways, war material dumps and machinery in the new German weapons factories erected in Poland. Arms, for which the Secret Army had great need, were dug up out of the caches in which they had been buried after the defeat, reconditioned and stored ready for use. The manufacture of hand-grenades and other weapons was begun in secret underground workshops, laboriously burrowed out beneath city cellars. A special section of artists and printers accurately forged false identity papers in a subterranean printing works excavated beneath the entrance hall of a Warsaw mansion. At the cost of enormous effort and one or two lives courier routes were established for the carriage of money and messages via Hungary to the Government in France.

  And then on 10 May 1940 Germany launched its western offensive. France collapsed four weeks later and the Polish Government fled to Britain, which pulled the remnants of its broken army back home across the Channel. It seemed as if the newly formed Secret Army, isolated in a continent dominated by the Nazis, was faced with extinction. For Soviet Russia was still bound by the alliance with the Nazis, still sending them war material at Stalin’s insistence.

  General Sikorski realized that the Germans would soon redirect thousands of troops to combat sabotage with even more savage reprisals against Polish citizens. The new situation called for a change of policy.

  Therefore, on 18 June 1940, four days after the fall of Paris, he sent a telegram to Rowecki ordering armed action by the underground to cease; and two days later another forbidding even sabotage as ‘pointless and provocative’.[18] Komorowski and Rowecki saw the sense of this, believing themselves that military action would involve heavy losses through reprisals. But they realized that faith in final victory over the Nazis and the Soviets might now waver in the ranks of the UFAS.

  Nevertheless they switched for the time being to a policy of intelligence and espionage only. At that time Poland was cut off from all news of the outside world except for Nazi and Soviet radio bulletins, which were more or less identical in tone. Foreign Commissar Molotov, for example, in a speech to the Supreme Soviet of the USSR on 31 October 1939 and subsequently broadcast from Moscow ad infinitum, had declared that: ‘Everybody should understand that an ideology cannot be destroyed by force, that it cannot be eliminated by war. It is therefore not only senseless but criminal to wage such a war as a war for the “destruction of Hitlerism” camouflaged as a fight for “democracy”…’[19]

  In the face of this propaganda the underground set up secret radio receiving stations tuned in to British and American news bulletins. They covered everything from Churchill’s speeches to BBC news reports of British naval and air clashes with German forces. Sometimes these bulletins were the purest invention. Leaflets with a printed appeal by the RAF to Poland not to weaken, and promising an early bombing offensive on Germany, fluttered down on Warsaw one twilight evening. Seeming to have come from a high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft they gladdened the Poles and infuriated the Germans. They were in fact printed by the Secret Army in Warsaw, lifted aloft by small balloons and automatically released at a suitable altitude.

  But these measures lifted the spirit of the oppressed people only temporarily. And grave setbacks followed in the later months of 1940. Dr Surzycki, a Christian Democrat leader whose eloquence had persuaded Komorowski to stay to help build the Secret Army in Poland, had become one of the main helpers on the intelligence front. One day in the autumn his secretary was caught by the Gestapo copying German documents for him and under severe torture she spoke his name. He was seized and tortured, but though sick and weak from illness he kept silent. He managed to send a message through a Polish prison-warder that he had not betrayed the underground. Shortly afterwards he died in a concentration camp.

  Next, the Germans discovered the Secret Army headquarters in Silesia. Starosta, the commander, burnt all documents, but was shot while jumping from a balcony and the organization there was dormant until a new leader could be found. Meantime, in Cracow, headquarters of the Gestapo, even the well-disguised Komorowski, with perfectly forged German documents, felt a sense of danger as he walked from house to house for military staff meetings. For safety he lived apart from his wife Irena and their son, stealing a few hours alone with them only on Saturdays and Sundays. She had spread the word among friends and acquaintances who were unaware of his underground role that he was serving abroad with Sikorski’s forces.

  Yet some curious instinct whispered to him that the Nazis were on his track, an instinct he would always obey and which would save him when colleagues ignored it and were seized. He looked for some way of avoiding public appearances, of being able to meet his military staff without suspicion. He hit on the idea of working in a newspaper shop belonging to a member of the underground and began work as an assistant there; he registered under the name of Wolanski with the Nazi labour authorities, and his documents were impeccable. Here his Chief of Staff and his liaison officers visited him daily in the guise of customers.

  But all these circumstances — German military successes in France; greater zeal of the Nazis in hunting down Poles in the Secret Army; General Sosnkowski’s elitist policy and General Sikorski’s order to cease armed action and sabotage — combined to cause a decrease for the time being both in the anti-Nazi impetus of the Poles and in the underground membership. From June 1940 to the spring of 1941 this fell from 75,000 to 54,000: and the total of combat platoons from 2,190 in October 1940 to 1,466 in March 1941.

  Yet the outcome of the fall of France was not wholly negative. General Rowecki — to which rank both he and Komorowski were appointed before General Sikorski left France for England — prepared the first detailed plan, with the aid of his military staff, for an armed uprising.

  The plan analysed Poland’s possible courses of action according to the doctrine of the ‘two enemies’, Germany and Soviet Russia.[20] It envisaged, with British and possibly US aid, the massive bombing of enemy bases, both Russian as well as German, the dropping of parachute divisions and the landing of armoured units on the Polish coast near Danzig.

  Conceived before the outbreak of the German-Soviet war, it nevertheless presupposed this likelihood, but even without it Rowecki foresaw the eventual defeat of the Nazis by British Commonwealth forces aided by the Polish Army and sooner o
r later reinforced by American troops. He was less certain about Soviet Russia:

  At the present moment it is difficult to foresee what the concrete position of the Soviets will be in the final stages of the war. There are several possibilities and they can be simplified to two basic ones: first, Russia will manage to maintain its neutrality almost to the last days, continually keeping a large army intact on its western boundaries ready to march out to conquer at the moment when Europe is in revolt. In this case a Polish insurrection, being unable to mobilize properly, and short of arms, would have little chance of success. We would merely oppose thousands of our best men to the motorized flood of the Soviet hordes in their westward march, not achieving any effective results bar the further destruction of our country and bloodshed on a massive scale. Secondly, Russia will be in a state of war with Germany and Japan, or Japan and eventually Germany. In this case it is most probable that the Germans will deal several heavy military defeats to the Soviets, penetrating deep into Soviet territories through the Ukraine. They will certainly shake the whole Soviet structure, weakening their cohesion and threatening their establishment, at the same time destroying the worth of an army already weakened by lack of success.

  General Rowecki thus looked forward to launching a general anti-Nazi insurrection at the critical moment of Germany’s defeat by the Western Powers; and, sooner or later, to achieving the same kind of coup against an exhausted Soviet Union.

  The ultimate objective was to re-establish Poland as a great Power independent of either the Soviet Union or Germany. In the process parts of White Russia and the entire Ukraine were to be freed from Soviet control. He also considered the likelihood of a contrasting development: